Research on Target Deviation Measurement of Projectile Based on Shadow Imaging Method in Laser Screen Velocity Measuring System

Sensors (Basel). 2020 Jan 19;20(2):554. doi: 10.3390/s20020554.

Abstract

In the laser screen velocity measuring (LSVM) system, there is a deviation in the consistency of the optoelectronic response between the start light screen and the stop light screen. When the projectile passes through the light screen, the projectile's over-target position, at which the timing pulse of the LSVM system is triggered, deviates from the actual position of the light screen (i.e., the target deviation). Therefore, it brings errors to the measurement of the projectile's velocity, which has become a bottleneck, affecting the construction of a higher precision optoelectronic velocity measuring system. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a method based on high-speed shadow imaging to measure the projectile's target deviation, ΔS, when the LSVM system triggers the timing pulse. The infrared pulse laser is collimated by the combination of the aspherical lens to form a parallel laser source that is used as the light source of the system. When the projectile passes through the light screen, the projectile's over-target signal is processed by the specially designed trigger circuit. It uses the rising and falling edges of this signal to trigger the camera and pulsed laser source, respectively, to ensure that the projectile's over-target image is adequately exposed. By capturing the images of the light screen of the LSVM system and the over-target projectile separately, this method of image edge detection was used to calculate the target deviation, and this value was used to correct the target distance of the LSVM to improve the accuracy of the measurement of the projectile's velocity.

Keywords: beam collimation; sequential control; shadow imaging; target deviation measurement; triggering; velocity measurement.